From a column by Robert Novak on Townhall.com:

Two senior senators, Democrat Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Republican Olympia Snowe of Maine, are pressuring ExxonMobil Corp. to stop funding scientists who question the conventional liberal wisdom on global warming.

So, two senators are trying to strong-arm a private company into signing on to their agenda. Are they working from a page in the Jesse Jackson play-book? Will ExxonMobil have to contribute to their campaign funds to get them off its back? Or do the senators actually think that there is something we can do or not do that will significantly affect climate change? I hope not. In my view, ants have about as much chance of significantly changing the global climate as humans do.

In an Oct. 27 letter to ExxonMobil CEO Rex W. Tillerson in Irving, Texas, the senators charged that the oil company's position has "made it increasingly difficult for the United States to demonstrate the moral clarity it needs across all facets of its diplomacy." Actually, U.S. government policy, as set by President Bush, is skeptical about global warming.

An oil company is hampering the diplomacy of the United States? Whoa! Must be some powerful company. Anyway, all we need to demonstrate moral clarity is the biggest weapons.

"We must request," said the Rockefeller-Snowe letter, "that ExxonMobil end any further financial assistance or other support to groups or individuals whose public advocacy has contributed to the small, but unfortunately effective, climate change denial myth."

One person's truth is another person's myth. I think the jury is still out on just who is promoting a myth.

Even if the global warming alarmists are right, that the effects of global warming will dramatically affect our lives, they have no way of knowing if the effects will be good or bad for us. So what if half of Florida will be covered with water? It has been that way before. It's not going to happen overnight; people will have plenty of time to migrate to higher ground.

Think about the economic boost to the inland parts of the state as the water rises. All that property will spend years as waterfront property (before it becomes underwater property) and will command high prices and will attract millions of tourists with deep pockets. Think about the economic gain from new construction as houses and businesses have to be rebuilt to replace those swamped by the rising oceans. That is, think about these things if you are one of those that believe that the devastation caused by natural disasters can be a net economic gain.

Seriously, why is it assumed that warmer is bad? Many parts of the world might benefit immensely from warmer temperatures. And how do we know that there won't be an offsetting natural phenomenon -- like the sun growing cooler? It is inconceivable to me that intelligent people can believe that global warming is among the greatest dangers that we face. So I have to believe that they have ulterior motives.

Let's wait until the first coastal city is underwater before getting all worked up over global warming.  By the way, what's going on with the bird flu scare? 

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The title of a Washington Post article on the melting Arctic ice sounded a little positive: "Melting Arctic Makes Way for Man." But the subtitle quickly changes the tone: "Researchers on icebreaker say shipping could add to risks for ecosystem." The article describes the voyage through the Northwest Passage of a Canadian ship loaded with researchers. The refrain is familiar. Change is afoot, change is bad and mankind is responsible for the change.

I'd like to point out a little detail to the researchers on the ship. It's not me, my neighbors, my friends or my relatives cruising around in the Arctic. It's you. The article mentions how powerful the ship's engines are. Are you concerned about the pollution you are spewing into the Arctic? No, you are worried about the potential polution from "the tramp steamer with a single hull under a Liberian flag and Philippine crew." Yes, you want those poor souls trying to make a living to stay out of your playground.

Here is a suggestion for all the people in a tizzy over global warming: Make a vow to never use any form of motorized transportation for the rest of your life. This would demonstrate that you are sincere in your belief that modern industrialized nations are responsible for global warming. It might be easier for you to keep this vow if you and your family move to one of the Inuit villages mentioned in the article.

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Borrowing a favorite question of OpinionJournal's Best of the Web Today: What would we do without experts? USA Today has an article from the AP that reports:

From ancient ruins in Thailand to a 12th-century settlement off Africa's eastern coast, prized sites around the world have withstood centuries of wars, looting and natural disasters. But experts say they might not survive a more recent menace: a swiftly warming planet.

Apparently something else has done more than threaten the "prized sites around the world." Why else would they be called ruins? Someone now expects us to get all worked up over the possibility that a bunch of ruins might get a little more ruined? It seems to me that there are too many people in this world with too little to do.

Recent floods attributed to climate change have damaged the 600-year-old ruins of Sukhothai in northern Thailand, the report said, while increasing temperatures are "bleaching" the Belize barrier reef...

Notice that the recent floods are "attributed to climate change." By whom? Have they not had floods in Thailand before global warming became a hot button issue? In a sense all dramatic weather events for all time are caused by climate change.

An increase in temperature of one degree in a hundred years is now bleaching the Belize barrier reef? I would think that if the reef is getting bleached that most of the bleaching is due to the 75 degrees or so of base temperature rather than the global warming increment.

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The Associated Press reports from Nairobi, Kenya that:

The world's oceans are becoming more acidic, which poses a threat to sea life and Earth's fragile food chain, a climate expert said Thursday.

What would we do without experts? How could anyone, much less an expert, reach the conclusion that the Earth's food chain is fragile? Perhaps experts' definition of fragile is different from mine. I've read that life has existed on Earth for several billion years (but that is most likely the finding of 'experts'). If life has existed for that long I would guess that some form of food chain has been around for that long. But, our current crop of experts believe that they have detected the advent of life threatening trends. Yeah, right. After billions of years life is seriously threatened now and they saw it coming.

Oceans have already absorbed a third of the world's emissions of carbon dioxide, one of the heat-trapping gases blamed for global warming, leading to acidification that prevents vital sea life from forming properly.

Wouldn't that be a good thing if you believe the global warming alarmists? I'm no expert, but I don't think the carbon dioxide absorbed by the oceans will be trapping much heat.

In a study titled "The Future Oceans - Warming Up, Rising High, Turning Sour," (Stefan) Rahmstorf and eight other scientists warned that the world is witnessing, on a global scale, problems similar to the acid rain phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s.

Did they really mean to say that? After all, the acid rain scare kind of fizzled. When is the last time you heard anything about acid rain?

Rahmstorf, the head of Germany's Potsdam Institute for Research into Climatic Effects, says more research is urgently needed to assess the impact of ocean acidification.

Bingo! Motive uncovered! More research equals more money.

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Steven Milloy asks, What Hurricane Season?, in an article at FoxNews.com. According to Milloy:

On May 22, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued its "2006 Atlantic Hurricane Outlook," forecasting an "80 percent chance of an above-normal hurricane season, a 15 percent chance of a near-normal season, and only a 5 percent chance of a below-normal season." NOAA called for "a very active 2006 season, with 13-16 named storms, 8-10 hurricanes, and 4-6 major hurricanes."

The NOAA adjusted the forecast downward in August but still predicted only a five percent chance of a below normal hurricane season. Milloy correctly observes that the hurricane season, which ended yesterday, was clearly below normal. But he goes further with the following questions and statement:

How can so many smart folks be so wrong? What's the lesson to be learned from NOAA's big whiff? Could it possibly be that predicting weather and climatic events isn't so easy?

...

Despite the vast collective expertise of NOAA scientists, immense quantities of atmospheric and oceanic data, and unprecedented computing power, NOAA failed miserably in predicting weather events a mere six months into the future -- and reiterated those same ill-conceived predictions at mid-season.

While it is clear that the NOAA or the media created the expectation of a severe hurricane season, Milloy is wrong to decide based on this one season that the NOAA "failed miserably." He reminds me of an Air Force fighter pilot that once challenged one of my predictions. The pilot was to fire a Sidewinder missile at a remotely controlled target aircraft on a test range. Before the test I provided him with launch parameters (position and speed relative to the target) within which he would have an estimated 0.9 probablity of destroying the target. After the test, in which he fired the missile within the launch parameters but failed to destroy the target, he declared rather strongly that my estimated kill probability was wrong. I told him that it very likely was, but that he had no way of knowing that. I pointed out to him that I did estimate a one in ten chance that he wouldn't destroy the target. (I don't think he was convinced. Some fighter pilots can't accept the possibility of losing when given a 90 percent chance of winning.) If the pilot repeated the test firing with the same lauch paramters 100 times and got only 50 kills (for example), then he would have a strong case that my estimate was wrong.

The NOAA did predict a one in twenty chance that the 2006 hurricane season would be below normal. So there is no way that Milloy could know that their predictions are wrong unless he could repeat this season enough times to show that the 5 percent chance of a below normal season should have been much higher. But he obviously can't do that.

However, I do agree with Milloy that we shouldn't rely too heavily on mathematical models to predict something as complex as weather patterns or phenomena, especially not for more than a few days into the future. My experience with modeling systems much less complex than weather convinced me that models are useful for studying trends but aren't very good at predicting specific outcomes. It is insanity to spend billions of dollars and depress the economies of countries around the world based on weather models projected decades into the future. If the models are that reliable then the NOAA should be able to more accurately tell us if it's going to rain this weekend.

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The Associated Press reports that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is prodding President Bush to help him terminate global warming. The block quotes are from the AP article followed by my comments:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who recently signed a sweeping law to cut greenhouse gas emissions in California, complained in a letter to President Bush that there is no coherent federal policy to stop global warming.

Just what California needs, another sweeping law. The article doesn't say if there is an incoherent federal policy to stop global warming. I wonder if the Terminator wants the federal law to be "sweeping" as well as "coherent."

The Republican governor wrote that the state's request for a federal waiver to set vehicle emissions standards has been "ignored with no explanation" despite an earlier letter from the governor to Bush, the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday.

The Terminator doesn't like being ingored, especially when he doesn't know why he's being ignored.

Schwarzenegger, up for re-election, has taken several jabs at fellow Republicans in Washington over environmental policy in recent weeks. He calls the fight against global warming one of the most important issues of modern times.

Politicians (or reporters) just can't help but weasel word everything they say. Notice that he calls the fight against global warming one of the most important issues of modern times. It doesn't say that he believes the fight against global warming is one of the most important issues of modern times. I can call white black if I want; I just won't be correct if I do.

Notice also that he calls the fight against global warming one of the most important issues of modern times. I could say that the fight against ingrown toenails is one of the most important issues of modern times, and be correct -- if I'm talking about the million most important issues.

At a recent campaign stop in San Diego, Schwarzenegger boasted of the steps he had taken to fight global warning and cut reliance on Mideast oil by promoting alternative energy. "The sad story is that, nationally, we don't have great leadership on that," he said.

Not like they do in California! Right Arnold?

California's efforts on global warming have been in the spotlight since Schwarzenegger and the state's Democrats reached an accord in August on legislation to cut greenhouse gases. The measure imposes a first-in-the-nation emissions cap on utilities, refineries and manufacturing plants in a bid to curb the gases that scientists blame for warming the Earth.

I seem to recall that one of the reasons that Gray Davis was recalled and Schwarzenegger was elected to replace him was that California was staggering under the burden of a huge debt, and one of the reasons for that was lost tax revenue due to manufacturing and other businesses leaving California because of burdensome laws and regulations. If I recall correctly, Arnold promised to fix that problem if elected. Further burdening utilities, refineries and manufacturing plants with caps on emissions doesn't seem like fixing the problem to me.

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The global warming alarmists would have us believe that mathematical climate models can accurately predict global temperatures in the year 2100. The several versions of GCMs (Global Climate Models) are predicting average temperature increases from about 2 to about 5 degrees Centigrade. Based on these predictions they want governments around the world to take drastic actions to decrease the production of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. These drastic actions could have significant negative effects on the world economies. All this because they think the globe might warm by as little as 2 degrees?

Notice that their models disagree by more than the smallest predicted temperature increase. If the models they used show a spread from 2 to 5, what is the chance that additional models would widen that spread? Perhaps one might even predict a temperature decrease. Based on my own experience with mathematical models I have little confidence in any model's ability to accurately predict 93 years into the future.

During most of my career I developed and used mathematical models to estimate weapon system performance for the Air Force. The models I worked with did not operate on a global scale but they were quite complex and took hours to run on high-speed computers. Nevertheless I, and my colleagues, never pretended that our models could accurately predict future outcomes. That is, although the models estimated future outcomes, we knew that the outcomes were based completely on the system and environmental data that is input to the model, and we knew that data was never perfect. We understood that there is no way that we could know either the precise environmental conditions at the time the weapon might be used in actual combat or the precise system parameters for the specific weapon fired in actual combat. The models were primarily used to perform system design trade-off studies and to produce probability of success charts to guide the pilots in employing the weapons.

No model of a physical process can reliably predict an outcome very far into the realm of the unknown. Models are constructed based on what we know today about how a physical process works. Models are run using data that we have collected to date -- or data that someone makes up for the future. So models essentially only model the past or the present. When their users move beyond the present they are just guessing. The only way the GCMs can be used to predict 93 years into the future is to make up 93 years worth of input data, including the levels of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. The models then are subject to not only the errors in the physical model itself but also the errors in the input data.

If you are still not convinced that the glowarm alarmists can't know, with any real confidence, that average global temperatures are going to be 2 to 5 degrees warmer in 2100, consider the five-day weather forecast. Although it's called a five-day forecast it often changes every day -- and I don't mean by just adding a new fifth day. Today's fourth day forecast is often different from yesterday's fifth day forecast despite the fact that they represent the same day. This is because -- with the passing of one day -- the forecasters have new and better data that allows them to make a more accurate forecast. It will be interesting to see how much the predicted average global temperature for the year 2100 has changed next year and five years from now.

Understand that I'm not arguing that climatologists should not use the GCMs in their global climate research. I'm confident that they understand the limitations of their models better than I do. I'm trying to make an argument against putting too much stock in the crusades of devious egomaniacs like Al Gore, who are prone to misinterpret the model results.

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Jonah Goldberg asks a good question in a recent column:  "Isn't it interesting how the same people who think "dissent is the highest form of patriotism" when it comes to the war think that dissent when it comes to global warming is evil and troglodytic?" If the global warming alarmists were truly confident in their position they wouldn't mind dissent. The reason they want to stifle dissent is exactly because they know their position is weak.

Glowarm (I'm tired of typing the whole phrase) is looking more and more like a religion. It has its prophet. You have to take it mostly on faith. Non-believers are labeled heretics and publicly ridiculed. It promises an apocalypse. You have to repent now and change your ways in order to stave off the apocalypse. You're allowed to compensate for your sins (using 'dirty' energy) by performing good works (purchasing carbon offsets).

My aim of course is to firmly establish Glowarm as a religion so that government won't be able to touch it. You know, the 'Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion' thing.

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If you think this is becoming a global warming skeptic's blog you may be right. Someone needs to help derail that out-of-control train. With all those jumping aboard it is a disaster in the making.

I received a link to an article by Dr Timothy Ball via e-mail. He is a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. He seems to be trying to inject a little reason into the debate and calm some of the hysteria:

No sensible person seeks conflict, especially with governments, but if we don't pursue the truth, we are lost as individuals and as a society. That is why I insist on saying that there is no evidence that we are, or could ever cause global climate change. And, recently, Yuri A. Izrael, Vice President of the United Nations sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirmed this statement. So how has the world come to believe that something is wrong?

A quick search of the internet revealed, as you might expect, that Dr Ball is reviled by the global warming believers in Canada. The search also revealed that he has said, as I did yesterday, that global warming might be a net positive for Canada.

If you find yourself in a debate with global warming adherents ask them if they believe its net effect on humanity (as opposed to its effect on individual humans) will be negative. They will most likely say that its effect will be negative and might say that it will be disastrous. Ask them then if they would like to have the earth in a cooling trend instead of a warming trend. That is, do they believe that, if the net effect of warming is bad, the net effect of cooling will be good? They most likely will say that cooling is bad too (they did say that just a few years ago). Then ask them if you understand correctly, based on their positions, that they believe the current state of the earth's climate is perfect for human existence. You probably won't get a straight answer to that question. At this point they will start questioning your credentials instead of addressing your question.

Let's look at the issue another way. What is the chance that at this point in time the earth's climate is perfect for human existence? If you have any scientific training at all you know that the chance is almost zero. But if it's not perfect then how do we manage so well? The answer is that we have adapted to and become accustomed to the current state of the earth's climate. We've learned to live with the hand we've been dealt. And that's what we'll continue to do whether the climate warms or cools.

Only egocentric people believe that their world is a perfect world. They are happy with the way things are now for them and care little that change might improve the lives of others.

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A few days ago I questioned the accuracy of the climate models being used as the basis for most of the alarm about global warming. Today I found a letter to the editor of the local paper that very closely echos my point of view. The writer appears to have a similar background to mine, but if our paths have ever crossed I don't remember it. I'm taking the liberty of republishing his letter here because I couldn't find a link to it at NWFDailyNews.com:

During the past 20 years, computer models have improved short-term weather forecasting in many ways. However, weather and climate models have also been misused by people who do not fully understand how computer models work.

As a developer and user of scientific computer models, I was always aware that my modeling results were limited in validity and accuracy by the detail, accuracy and validity of the modeling software and the input data I used. Realistically, I could have obtained almost any result I desired if I made appropriate assumptions in my modeling program design and/or my input data.

Examples of misuses of weather/climate computer models are the annual forecasts of numbers and severity of hurricanes, and the ongoing issue of global climate change.

Critical weather and climate factors such as the unpredictable dynamic physics of cloud formation, variations in atmospheric gases and variations of ocean currents are not well documented or understood. Such natural phenomena are important determinants of weather and climate. This should be recognized as a serious problem with these long-term forecast models.

Even when well-known statistical techniques are used to increase the level of confidence in any modeling, the end results are still impacted by the validity and accuracy of the programming science and assumptions, parametric data accuracy, and any data omissions.

How accruate are long-term climate forecasts when models such as those just described are used? Accurate enough to believe widely accepted disaster scenarios derived from some global-warming modeling forecasts? I don't think so. Also, don't bother with those annual hurricane forecasts for the same reasons.

JOE COBB, Valparaiso FL

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